Monday, May 24, 2010

The music video was directed by Swedish director, Jonas Åkerlund, who has previously directed music videos for artists like The Smashing Pumpkins, Madonna, Moby, Rammstein, and U2. His wife Bea Åkerlund was hired as Gaga's stylist for the video. Gaga told MTV that she had finished shooting "[..] my video for 'Paparazzi,' which I really am very pleased with the way that turned out. It's like a short film." In an interview with The Canadian Press on May 26, 2009, Gaga cited her video as "the most amazing creative work that [she's] put together so far." She went on to describe the idea behind the video and the message it gives as,

"It has a real, genuine, powerful message about fame-whoring and death and the demise of the celebrity, and what that does to young people. The video explores ideas about sort of hyperbolic situations that people will go to in order to be famous. Most specifically, pornography and murder. These are some of the major themes in the video.

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

"Freedom! '90" (also known simply as "Freedom") is a song written and performed by George Michael, and released on Epic Records in 1990. The "'90" added to the end of the title is to prevent confusion with a Wham! song also titled "Freedom".

As if to reinforce the song's sentiment, Michael refused to appear in the music video - which was directed by David Fincher and shot by Jeff Cronenweth - and instead recruited a number of supermodels (including Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington, Tatjana Patitz, Cindy Crawford, and male models John Pearson, Mario Sorrenti, and Peter Formby) to mouth the words. It also featured the destruction of the three items from "Faith" that had come to symbolize Michael's career at that point: his leather jacket (burned), jukebox (exploded) and guitar (exploded).